Table 3.
RT literature ordered by publication status (published versus unpublished), followed by chronological and alphabetical order (RT classification:en endogenous, tp time pressure, td time delay)
| Studies | RT | Model | Conclusions | Other measures | Task |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published works | |||||
| Brañas-Garza et al. (2016) | en | Moral, iterated/strategic reasoning | RT was longer in the Ultimatum game compared to the Yes-no game (due to greater strategic risk and the lack of a dominant strategy), subjects with longer RT exhibit more dispersed behavior (due to the resolution of moral dilemmas) | Ultimatum, Yes-no games | |
| Cappelen et al. (2016) | en | Dual-system | Fair behavior is associated with shorter RT even after controlling for cognitive ability and other controls | Progressive matrices test | Dictator game |
| Devetag et al. (2016) | en | Dual-system, heuristics, search and attentional | The number of lookups (and lookup time) for different cells is predictive of choice and strategic thinking | Eye-tracking | normal form games |
| Nishi et al. (2016) | en | Cognitive dissonance/conflict | Reciprocal choices are faster than non-reciprocal choices. Cooperation is faster than defection in cooperative environments and vice-versa in non-cooperative environments | Repeated public goods and Prisoner’s dilemma games | |
| Rubinstein (2016) | en | Dual-system | Actions defined as contemplative or instinctive using RT can be used to create a player typology based on how contemplative a player is. This typology is found to be predictive of behavior in out-of-sample games | Ten different games | |
| Agranov et al. (2015) | en | Iterated/strategic reasoning | Large proportion of naive types, whose players often switch choices haphazardly over time, without exhibiting increasing sophistication. Strategic players switch choices less and their behavior increases in sophistication over time | 2/3 guessing game (p-beauty) | |
| Evans et al. (2015) | en,tp,td | Dual-system, cognitive dissonance, sequential sampling | Greater decision conflict is associated with slower RT, leading to an inverted-U shaped relationship between RT and cooperation | Questionnaire | Prisoner’s dilemma, one-shot and repeated public goods games, trust game |
| Oechssler et al. (2015) | td | Emotions | Time delay (24 hours) leads to a lower rejection rate for lottery payoffs, but no difference for cash payoffs | Cognitive Reflection Test | Ultimatum game |
| Rand et al. (2015) | tp,td | Dual-system | Political group membership does not interact with time constraints in affecting cooperation levels | One-shot public goods game, continuous Prisoner’s dilemma | |
| Cone and Rand (2014) | tp,td | Dual-system | Cooperation is higher under time pressure when the PG game is framed in a competitive versus cooperative context; thereby excluding adherence to social norms as an explanation | One-shot public goods game | |
| Eliaz and Rubinstein (2014) | en | Emotions | No differences in RT for different types of subjects | Fairness of randomization procedures in social situations | |
| Lindner (2014) | tp | Iterated/strategic reasoning | Entry rates under time pressure are lower the more steps of reasoning used by subjects | Market entry game, 11–20 Money Request Game | |
| Rand et al. (2014) | tp,td | Dual-system | Time pressure induced more cooperation on average; however, cooperation under time pressure decreased with experience | One-shot public goods game | |
| Rand and Kraft-Todd (2014) | tp,td | Dual-system | Time pressure increased cooperation rates only for subjects that were trusting and inexperienced. Changes in the cooperation rate under time pressure were similar for both competitive and collaborative framing of the game | Questionnaire (degree of trust and faith in intuition) | One-shot public goods game |
| Verkoeijen and Bouwmeester (2014) | tp,td | Dual-system | No significant effect of time pressure, knowledge of opponents’ moves, type of opponent (human versus computer) on contribution levels | One-shot public goods game | |
| Guida and Devetag (2013) | en | Dual-system, heuristics | RT is less for games with a focal point, is positively correlated to the variance of the action with the highest average payoff, is higher the more equilibrium actions taken by a subject | Personality test, Holt-Laury lottery task | and normal form games |
| Fischbacher et al. (2013) | en | Social preferences /heuristics | RT is increasing in the number of social properties of the allocations that heterogeneous subjects attended to, e.g., kindness, fairness | Mini-ultimatum games | |
| Hortala-Vallve et al. (2013) | tp | Cognitive effort | Better plans of action were pursued the longer RT was, the relationship between RT and the (in)completeness of information depends on the bargaining procedure | Bargaining | |
| Jiang (2013) | en | Cognitive effort | Honest choices exhibit longer RT | Cheating games | |
| Lindner and Sutter (2013) | tp | Iterated/strategic reasoning, cognitive effort | Subjects’ behavior was closer to the equilibrium prediction under time pressure | 11–20 Money Request Game | |
| Lotito et al. (2013) | en | Dual-system | RT and own contributions are negatively related, RT and others’ recent contributions (i.e., degree of prior cooperation) are negatively related | Public goods game | |
| McKinney and Huyck (2013) | en | Eureka learning, heuristics | 35% of subjects experienced a Eureka moment–i.e., realizing that a heuristic works well–after which RT is consistently less | Nim game | |
| Neo et al. (2013) | td | Dual-system | No relationship between time delay (15 mins.) and sender/responder choices (IG), time delay associated with decreased rejections by responders (UG) | Investment (IG) and ultimatum (UG) games | |
| Rubinstein (2007) | en | Dual-system | Actions categorized as instinctive were executed more quickly than actions categorizes as cognitive, i.e., requiring a deeper reasoning process | Numerous games and non-strategic tasks | |
| Tinghög et al. (2013) | tp,td | Dual-system | No effect of time pressure on cooperation rates | One-shot and repeated public goods and prisoner’s dilemma games | |
| Arad and Rubinstein (2012) | en | Iterated/strategic reasoning | Longer RT was associated with higher average payoffs | Colonel Blotto game | |
| Glazer and Rubinstein (2012) | en | Iterated/strategic reasoning | The more difficult it is to be persuasive, the longer the RT | Persuasion game | |
| Rand et al. (2012) | tp,td | Dual-system | The level of contributions is inversely related to RT (whether endogenous or exogenous) | One-shot public goods game | |
| Cappelletti et al. (2011) | tp | Dual-system | Proposers under time pressure offer more, however there is no effect of cognitive load on offers | Ultimatum game | |
| Grimm and Mengel (2011) | td | Dual-system, emotions | Time delay (10 mins.) increases the acceptance rate of low offers if subjects had not explicitly or implicitly expressed negative emotions | Ultimatum game | |
| Matthey and Regner (2011) | en | Cognitive dissonance | RT is longer in social dilemmas where cognitive dissonance plays a role—in this case, when subjects can choose whether to observe the other player’s payoffs or not | Dictator game | |
| Suter and Hertwig (2011) | tp | Dual-system, cognitive effort | Time pressure reduces cognitive control over moral instincts, thereby increasing the probability of deontological responses | Moral dilemmas | |
| Gneezy et al. (2010) | en | Cognitive effort | RT is lower in winning positions than losing positions, also RT increases the more steps required in backward analysis of the game | Race game | |
| Pintér and Veszteg (2010) | en | Dual-system | No relationship between RT and truthfulness | Voting schemes | |
| Ibanez et al. (2009) | tp | Cognitive effort | Time pressure resulted in less search (sub-optimal) in the short-run (but no long-term effect), RT declined with experience without a performance trade-off | Bid/search task | |
| Kuo et al. (2009) | en | Dual-system | RT was lower for coordination games compared to dominance-solvable games | fMRI | Dominance solvable (DS) and coordination (C) games |
| Piovesan and Wengström (2009) | en | Social preferences, emotions | Lower RT is associated with selfish choices both between- and within-subjects | Dictator game | |
| Knoch and Fehr (2007), Knoch et al. (2006) | en | Self-control, fairness | Disruption of the right PFC using rTMS was associated with lower RT and a greater rate of acceptance of unfair offers | rTMS, elicitation of judgments | Ultimatum game |
| Rubinstein (2007) | en | Dual-system | Significant heterogeneity in RT was found conditional on the responses, lower RT was associated with more intuitive choices and less sophisticated reasoning | Normal form, p-beauty, ultimatum games | |
| Kocher and Sutter (2006) | tp,en,inc | Iterated/strategic reasoning | High time pressure results in lower payoffs and slower convergence to the equilibrium, RT is lower for incentivized time-dependent payoffs without a negative impact on performance | p-beauty games with continuous payoffs | |
| Sutter et al. (2003) | tp | Emotions | Responders are more likely to reject offers under time pressure; however, this difference disappears with repetition | Ultimatum game | |
| Unpublished works | |||||
| Goeschl et al. (2016) | en,tp | Dual-system | Subjects contributed less under time pressure—this effect was stronger for subjects that were not confused about the game, i.e., where not error-prone. However, they did not find more confusion about the game in a time-pressure treatment | One-shot and repeated public goods game | |
| Merkel and Lohse (2016) | en,tp,td | Dual-system, sequential sampling | Accounting for the subjective difficulty of choosing between alternatives, within- and between-subjects evidence did not confirm the hypothesis that time-pressure leads to fairer decisions | Dictator and Prisoner’s dilemma game | |
| Spiliopoulos (2016) | en | Heuristics, dual-system | RT depends on the interaction between the win-stay/lose-shift heuristic and a pattern-detecting reinforcement learning model, conflict leads to longer RT | Repeated constant-sum game | |
| Dyrkacz and Krawczyk (2015) | tp | Dual-system | Under time pressure, subjects were more averse to inequality (if their own payoff was less than their opponent’s) | Dictator and other games involving social preferences | |
| Karagözoğlu and Kocher (2015) | tp | Heuristics, focal points, fairness | Under high time pressure, disagreement rates increase and last-minute agreements are more frequent; the probability of settling on an explicit reference point increases at the cost of the implicit equal-split | Bargaining | |
| Recalde et al. (2015) | en | Errors | Lower RT is associated with erroneous decisions (dominated choices), faster subjects were insensitive to changes in payoffs whereas slower subjects were more sensitive | One-shot and repeated public goods game | |
| Spiliopoulos et al. (2015) | tp | Iterated/strategic reasoning, heuristics | Under time pressure, subjects are more likely to not search for opponents’ payoffs, and there is a significant increase in the use of the Level-1 heuristic accompanied by a reduction in the Dominance-1 heuristic and Nash equilibrium behavior | Information search (Mouselab) | One-shot normal form games |
| Turocy and Cason (2015) | en | Incentives | RT tends to be longer for higher signals in first-price auctions, RT is independent of signals in second-price auctions | First- and second-price auctions | |
| Schotter and Trevino (2014b) | en | Search and attentional, eureka learning | RT can be used to predict out-of-sample behavior with more accuracy than the equilibrium prediction | Global games | |
| Halali et al. (2011) | en | Dual-system, cognitive control | RT is less when rejecting an unfair offer than accepting it, ego-depletion led to an increase in the rate of rejection of unfair offers | Ultimatum game | |
| Bosman et al. (2001) | td | Emotions | Behavior and self-reported emotions are not affected by a time delay of 1 h | Elicitation of expectations and emotions | Ultimatum game |